Lyons: In police raid, did federal agent break the law?

Authorities entered a Sarasota County nurse's home and pointed a gun at her, leading to a standoff.

Tom Lyons

When a federal agent opened a front door and pointed his gun at her, the Sarasota nurse I wrote about last week thought she was the victim of a home invasion by thugs.

And she was, say a lot of people expressing outrage at the way local and federal police terrified Louise Goldsberry.

Those people especially dislike that the federal marshal involved, Matt Wiggins, seemed to think he was a model of good police work because he did not shoot Goldsberry or arrest her in response to her holding a pistol to fend him off.

Never mind that he was in her apartment on bad information and bad guesses, had no warrant to enter, and that Goldsberry didn't know he was a cop and had never even heard of the man the agent sought. And she had only grabbed her gun because she had been panicked seconds before by a man pointing a gun at her through her kitchen window, her first clue that anything was going on.

Wiggins called out that he was a law officer and soon opened her living room door when the occupants did not. Goldsberry — an operating room nurse with no criminal record — was cowering and screaming in her hallway. As I've reported, when Wiggins pointed a gun and a blinding light at her and her boyfriend and yelled curse-filled commands, Goldsberry was even less prone to think he was a cop.

That all lived to tell the tale is a good thing. Wiggins is probably correct to think he acted with more restraint that many cops would have, in such a spot. He may well have been able to kill them from behind his tactical shield, while confident it would be deemed a justified shooting — regardless that he was in the wrong place looking for someone unknown to everyone there, and who had never been in the apartment.

But was that armed police entry illegal? Don't cops need a search warrant? Isn't a woman's apartment her castle?

The answer has many maybes.

A Sarasota lawyer emailed me to insist that was an illegal entry, flagrant and simple. But the more I have read — and after asking the past president of the Sarasota County Bar, Derek Byrd — the more that became unclear.

Byrd says it sounds improper, and may well have been. But the big argument would be about why police thought a suspect was in that apartment.

Wiggins told me he came to the complex on a tip — no details given as to the source — that a serious felony suspect was there somewhere. Only when one vest-wearing cop looked and aimed his gun through one apartment window, and Goldsberry screamed and ducked and then refused to open the door, did police decide that must be the place.

But the fugitive being sought was a man, and a thinking officer might have calmly said — through the door — “Ma'am, sorry we scared you. Please just call 911 and give your address. Ask them to confirm that we are police, OK? There are about two dozen of us out here, and we are looking for a bad guy we think is in your neighborhood. Take your time, we'll wait.”

Instead, Wiggins soon opened the door and pointed his gun and blinding light at the people inside and yelled cursing commands loudly during a gun-to-gun standoff.

Was there justification for that extremely dangerous act?

From what Byrd can see, “they didn't have enough.” But he said it could depend on the information that brought them there.

An anonymous tip?

“That has zero credibility,” Byrd said.

But if the agent could provide more information to a judge, it might become more convincing.

Even so, there is the issue of Wiggins suddenly assuming he had the right door in the complex because of Goldsberry's reaction.

“Things can happen that legitimately arouse suspicions,” Byrd said, and police can act on reasonable conclusions.

But was that an example?

Police often just have a suspicion, and don't worry enough about constitutional rights or the trauma caused by being wrong, Byrd said, by way of an answer.

Sure, they want to find the suspect. “But there's a right way and wrong way,” he said. Too often, “they just think the ends justify the means.”

That's why your castle is only secure from a warrantless police invasion until a cop decides, without asking any judge, that he has cause to go in. If he kills you while doing it, guess who gets blamed?